Christopher Wool makes art, and thus culture, and thus reality accessible to everyone in an instant. Heralded as one of Today’s art Gods, Wool throws down the gauntlet with a gambit. If you get the joke, you get reality, the big picture, and everything. Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living” and this rightfully frightened us. We imagine, in our deep subconscious that Socrates stands in judgement, and if we are insufficiently examined, we won’t make the cut. We will be condemned to the perpetual purgatory of being a Philistine.
Wool let’s us escape our dim fate by giving us the impression that if we get the joke, we didn’t miss the train.
Codicil: The whole post, including the faux art (using my handy Christopher-Wool-Stencil template) in less than 15 minutes. The real point is the shit is so easy I can make knock-offs in as little as 15 minutes. It’s kinda’ like when people said of various art, “My three year old could do that” or “I could do that”. One makes the argument better if one goes through the little bit of trouble of proving it. My versions were done in Photoshop, but the aesthetic is essentially the same. I’ve made stencils before. If you can do the mock-up in PS, you can do the full-sized stencil, no problemo. And no, getting the joke doesn’t mean you get art, culture, reality, or necessarily even squat. Gotta’ make another Wool with the world “squat” in it. Somehow that seems appropriate.
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 